The Reynolds Bickerstaff Podcast

Transaction Mindset vs. Referral Mindset: PART 2

March 20, 2019 Reynolds Bickerstaff Episode 19
Transaction Mindset vs. Referral Mindset: PART 2
The Reynolds Bickerstaff Podcast
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The Reynolds Bickerstaff Podcast
Transaction Mindset vs. Referral Mindset: PART 2
Mar 20, 2019 Episode 19
Reynolds Bickerstaff

As you move from a Transaction Mindset to a Referral Mindset the 4th item to focus on is Consistency and the 5th is your FLOW. After attending a seminar by Ninja Selling Founder, Larry Kendall, and reading his article in Real Trends, I created a presentation to share his ideas. 
These simple practices will help you build stronger relationships and increase your income.

https://youtu.be/TT5hVOcR7p8

Show Notes Transcript

As you move from a Transaction Mindset to a Referral Mindset the 4th item to focus on is Consistency and the 5th is your FLOW. After attending a seminar by Ninja Selling Founder, Larry Kendall, and reading his article in Real Trends, I created a presentation to share his ideas. 
These simple practices will help you build stronger relationships and increase your income.

https://youtu.be/TT5hVOcR7p8

Speaker 1:

Today is his part two from our meeting two weeks ago we talked about the referral mindset and the transaction mindset and feel. Remember we talked about the hospitality Ian and the difference between service and hospitality. And we covered, we covered three things, the five keys to earn referrals. And this is all taken from Larry Kendall's Ninja selling a process for generating referrals. I don't know if y'all heard of Larry Kendall. He has some Ninja selling courses in leading Ari's access and I've watched a couple of them. They are really good and he just breaks things down. So simply, and I think that's part of the challenge today is things have gotten a little over complicated when we need to kind of get back to just the basics. And that's what this is about. So today we're discovering consistency and your followup, which is what he calls your flow. The question is, you were kind of talking about this earlier, is why do agents spend thousands of dollars attracting and chasing strangers? Why don't we spend thousands of dollars on Zillow, social media? I mean, why don't we do that? It works. And the reason it works is because 74% of agents do not follow up with their clients after they close. So it works to pay Zillow to by Zip code leads because the agent that sold them the house or where with in the past is simply not following up with them. Same thing with social media

Speaker 2:

and

Speaker 1:

I dunno, how has that changed much Allen, since you've been in business

Speaker 2:

that

Speaker 1:

this has changed a lot since the Internet was introduced to real estate. When you could meet someone besides word of mouth, I could go find someone online and you would've thought agents would be doing a better job at fon over their past clients, but 74% and we've talked about that before. It's crazy that people don't follow up consistently and so what happens and we're going to get into it as well. So how do you do that? How do you establish consistency and then how do you establish flow with your past clients? It is really easy. We, we are not going to talk about setting productivity goals and I'm going to generate 12 are fertile is this month and$10,000 a month. Consistency is just about setting activity goals being very simple. I'm going to write two notes a day. How hard is it right to personal notes a day. It takes like maybe, maybe 10 or 15 minutes at the most depending on how many children are running into wherever you're sitting, you're trying to write a note. Um, so send two to three pieces each month. Pace, what's a piece? A note, the email postcard. Yeah, newsletter. And then I'm going to make five phone calls a day. It could be to your existing clients as that. This is not cold calling and it's just, I'm going to call five people a day and talk to them on the phone. If you have five listings, then you know and you want to call every seller that day, then call every seller. I don't recommend calling them every day, but point as these don't have to be new people and meet people that you know and creating activities is what helps you connect that to consistency. Because if I told you, well, Alan, you want to make a$10,000 this month, let's set a goal based on your production of what you need to do. If you set activity goals and you consistently do these things, then the money is going to take care of itself. The money will come after. If you do those sentences. This is just a simple example. That's not the golden rule on what to do, but I was just giving an example what you could do now to be consistent and it's just little, little things. So what does flow, Larry Kendall says, flow is frequency of interaction. Why does your past client who you sold a house to three years ago not call you when they're ready to list and buy something else because you are not in flow. You are not the person they thought of and someone else moved in on your social network with them. Now they know Matt who's a brand new agent. They see him at the club or they see him at the grocery store and he lives in the neighborhood. Um, and I got news for you can't live in every neighborhood where your clients live, but that's how some people get business is because agents don't follow up with their past clients. And is that simple? So frequency of interaction, how can you be consistent and how can you be frequent with your interaction? Well let's talk about these. What is valuable? What is valuable information? It's not valuable to us. It's what do your customers want to receive and customers just to receive information that either solves a problem or makes them feel good. They don't necessarily want to know how many homes you sold last month, which by the way we think is very impressive and important and we are extremely proud of you. But most clients, it's not valuable to them. I didn't make them necessarily feel good and it doesn't solve the problem. So an example would be market stats. And this is the example we're going to use throughout these next steps. Cause it's really easy to follow. So market stats might make them feel good if the market's improving, it might solve a problem. The problem is I don't know what's going on. A local real estate market. Okay, that's easy. I'm a real estate agent. I can educate my client. So the valuable information we're choosing is market stats. Well then you've got to customize it. So not just market stats about the entire Muskogee county or Harris County market or Russell or Lee.

Speaker 2:

Yeah,

Speaker 1:

I'm going to send them specific information. I'm going to send them information about their specific neighborhood. So maybe I'll send market stats on, um, just rocky shoals or um, maple ridge or their specific community. Or maybe they're the area. Some you have to go a little larger. Some neighborhoods may be too small, but so I'll drill down on market stats for their neighborhood and then went on to personalize it. This is a golden little nugget. So I hope everybody writes this down. Sending us on a note. Write a personal note. You're Allen. I was just thinking about you this week while I was reviewing the market stats for your area. My results show bit. Homes in gray rock are generally selling around$150 a square foot. If you like to chat about it later, give me a call. There's so much more powerful than sitting down and email or a postcard that has general information, right? Because not only was that valuable a personalize it and customize it and make an Alan, what might it feel good when you get a note from somebody then, I mean, that makes you feel good that somebody was thinking about me and they took the time to just let me know I was, they were thinking about me. So the last piece of flow is art and science. And as we talked about, you have to think about what your customers want to hear you. So you have to focus on what are their needs. Allen's needs are going to be much different than Matt's needs and Tom's needs and Chris's needs. So how can I be? Let's go back. I want to be valuable. I want it to. I want to customize it. I want to be personalized and it's gotta be part art and science. I've got to be thinking, what does Alan need from me? It's going to achieve all of those things I did. Does that make sense? This is so key. Personalize. I promise you no one is doing that here. And even if folks are watching right now on Facebook, I challenge you to do it too. Um, it's so easy. Hey, I was thinking about you and just want to let you know the market activity. If your area has increased 5% if you'd like to chat about it, give me a call. That's it. You could do that for your past clients every, every quarter. And we know the market doesn't change that much. But what if something changed with them? They got a new job or they had another milestone in their life that you weren't aware of because you weren't interacting with them frequently so they didn't think that you would need to know because they haven't heard from you in awhile. That's the real risk is that when we don't follow up with our clients, then someone else follows up with them just because they're more engaged. Um, so again, that's just with the market data, but you can do something else. Um, you could find a way to make it more personal for them. Um, but you have to rethink about what, what would my customer want to hear? See for me not what do I want to send them this month, because we had to check off my list of what I mailed out before someone asked me, are you saying anything to your past clients? Yeah, yeah. I'm sending him something. You know, what is it? I don't know. I haven't sent it yet, but I'm going to do it. But if you make it easy and create ease, a actionable plans to notes a day, I just one note today, maybe that's more realistic, one note a day is still a lot. If you're doing zero, nope, that's a huge improvement. If you personalize that note to your past clients, that could be really, really valuable. So we haven't identified these specific monetary benefit, but the benefits of doing this a per easy to understand, you'll generate more business, I promise you will. We also build stronger relationships with your clients because the truth is y'all are always thinking about your clients and figuring out ways to help them. They just don't always think about you because

Speaker 2:

okay,

Speaker 1:

they're not always selling a house and when that moment comes up to make a decision, if you're not top of mine, there's eight or 10 more agents they could probably call and so they do because the average consumer spends, it's like nine to 20 months in the search process. They go back and forth at dinner table or do you want to move here? Do we really want to start looking? But once they start to look for real estate, they pick an agent in less than a week. And if y'all have call it any of these leads from the website or from Zillow or anywhere else, people will work with the first person they speak with and it's crazy. But they will tell you clear. Yeah. For their website. Say you're the first person that called me back.[inaudible] everyone tells you to follow up within 15 minutes or less. And I know some of you all have been successful at making contact wasn't cause you've told me and because it's the truth they have bought before but nobody's built relationship with them. So if you do these simple things, everything else will follow. I thought it was a great quote to share. Your life becomes a printout resulting from the small decisions you make each day. They are compounded over time.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 1:

You wrote one note a day and let's not count Saturday and Sunday because let's be honest, who's going to write a note on Saturday and Sunday? I'm not writing a note on Saturday and Sunday. So if you wrote two notes a day during the work week, that's 10 notes a week, right? That is a lot. I made notes. Is that a year? That's like two orders of stationary. You'd have to restock your stationary every six months. If you did that, and maybe you don't want to buy the cranes dollar 50 you know, a note stationary, but just like if you did that for three months, so 120 notes, that has a lot. Maybe you don't have 120 people to send a note to. Wow. You send a note to someone each month.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

That is really strong. If you just had 30 or 40 people on your list and you send a handwritten note that's two or three sentences each person once a month, and you did that for three more months, four more months, that could have a huge impact on your business. Not Today, but a couple of months from now. And that's easy stuff to do. And I promise you all, we've talked about that before. It's the same thing with direct mail. People don't really send it right, which is why it works when it checks the boxes off on those categories where it's customizable. So it means something, it's valuable and it's somewhat personalized. But if you put some of that information on a note,

Speaker 2:

yeah

Speaker 1:

you would. People would think you are the greatest real estate agent in the world. You wrote me, you wrote me a note about them. What do you think the market's doing in my area? He didn't say, Hey, I think I can sell your house for 187 you want to, I've got a client in the car, you want to let me in said, hey, I'm thinking about Ja was doing a market research, uh, on your area and it looks like homes have improved 4% or the average square footage has gone up some when that hits the right person. Ooh, that is a really powerful tool. So I'll leave you with this. This is why so many agents do not get referrals from their past clients. Well, there's really two reasons. One, they, they don't realize that your next transaction the better than this one. So they don't hit it out of the park on that first transaction, but maybe they don't do a terrible job. Okay. So just based on the job that they perform with that client, for that transaction, it's a 50 50 chance that client may use them again. And the only way to overcome any of that is if you follow up and 74% of agents don't ever follow up. So here's the news. You can do a bad job, people will forgive you if you're likable, right? We met, we make mistakes, things happen. But if you make a mistake and they forgive you, I was so worried, so worried that they're never going to use me again cause we barely got through that transaction and you don't do anything for the next couple of months, the next year they want it. They won't work with you again. So it's so easy to forget about that and have a transaction mindset and set of the referral mindset. So our challenge for you is be thinking about some simple activities, simple actions you can take each day. It'll get you closer to having more business than you can handle. Build stronger relationships with your clients and the money is not something you'll have to set a goal for us because it will come because you're doing these small, simple things that build value for your business every day and your clients do business with you again and they start sending you referrals as well because when you think about 74% that's huge. That's why people were still getting into this business. We have a a new agent that's is going to join us tomorrow, brand new, and that's the one thing I told him is it's a great time to get in this business. And he said, why? I said, because we're still doing a bad job of following up with our own clients. I mean, right. If you went into a market and said, I want to open a restaurant here. And so that's great because people hate coming back to this restaurant, but it's the only place to get pizza, but it's just terrible. So we'd love to have another pizza joint and it's real easy to generate business. Real estate is simple. We just think people aren't going to call us back or need us for another couple of years. So why am I going to spend like$20 a year keeping up with them? Well then you get a bunch of clients and it's hard. And then there's other excuses and look, hey, I did that too. I'm not perfect. MMM. I should still be following up with people I did business with years ago. Um, but Alan won't let me hire a personal assistant, so it's not in the budget or something. Um, but as hard, that's also really easy to do. And if you think about looking at, looking at setting some activity goals, that's so much easier than setting up production goal, right? Hello. It's wanted you to know today I'm gonna send out two or three pieces of mine and I'll make a couple phone calls a day. Those bottom two you probably already do, but the top one you may not do. It could just be a note to someone you close or someone you met with. And if you don't have that many people, and guess what? They're going to be getting a lot of notes and they're going to think, well, maybe, maybe you don't want write two notes to someone each month. That may be a little overboard, but you get, the point is it's not the amount of people that you're working with, it's just the activity that you're doing and what can happen because of that. So I want to challenge you all to think about that when you're looking at going from the transaction mindset to the referral mindset, because I promise you this is where everybody wants to be, that we just get stuck here is after that transaction's done, you're going onto another transaction and to another and we just forget about the things we're supposed to do. So look at your activity plan and maybe that will help you move closer towards the referral mindset and generate some referral business from your clients, even people you hadn't done business with, just your friends. People you know know if one of my friends wrote me a note once a year said, hey, I'm just thinking about your hope business is great. I promise you, I would stop and think, wow, that really made me feel good. What can I, what can I do to help this person? Um, that stuff really is powerful and it can make a big difference in your business. So the challenge you all to think about that over the next couple of weeks, and if we can help you with any of this or come up with some ideas, we'd love to do that. I want to thank y'all for being here today with us this morning. Thank you.